Why Use JSP?
In the early days of the Web, the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) was the only tool for developing dynamic web content. However, CGI is not an efficient solution. For every request that comes in, the web server has to create a new operating-system process, load an interpreter and a script, execute the script, and then tear it all down again. This is very taxing for the server and doesn’t scale well when the amount of traffic increases.
Numerous CGI alternatives and enhancements, such as FastCGI, mod_perl from Apache, NSAPI from Netscape, ISAPI from Microsoft, and Java servlets from Sun Microsystems, have been created over the years. While these solutions offer better performance and scalability, all these technologies suffer from a common problem: they generate web pages by embedding HTML directly in programming language code. This pushes the creation of dynamic web pages exclusively into the realm of programmers. JavaServer Pages, however, changes all that.
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